Puslapio vaizdai
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help Mendoza to pick up the drawings. Suddenly he made a little exclamation.

"But," he said, "this is not without merit. Let me see the others, if I may." "I am in a hurry," said Mendoza, "but you have been more generous than I had expected. Look at them, by all means, but please be quick. I have an appointment with two ladies."

"Two?" said Lemaître as he ran his eye over Mendoza's work. "For one so young you are fortunate. By whom are these sketches?"

"By Mendoza," said Mendoza. "And who is Mendoza?"

"I am Mendoza," said Mendoza. "You are, are you?" said Lemaître. "Well, Monsieur Mendoza, I think I like your work. Suppose you leave these things here and come back to-morrow with some more. It is only a suggestion, of course, and I promise nothing; but it may be worth your while."

"I shall be careful," said Mendoza, "to tell them so." He ran out of the gallery, jumped into a cab, and was driven back to the café. "Decidedly," he said to the boulevard-"decidedly this is my lucky

day."

Arrived at the café, he descended hastily, changed a ten-franc piece with the waiter, paid the cab, and hurried to the side of madame and madamoiselle, who were still seated at their table.

"Madame," he said, "I told you I might bring you good news. I do. I have sold the picture with which madamoiselle was pleased to be dissatisfied for eighty francs. Here are seventy-eight of them. The missing two are charged to traveling expenses. Madame, I wish you "— good day. Madamoiselle," and he kissed the child gallantly on the cheek,— "I wish you a handsome husband. And so, farewell!" He swept off his hat and departed, running, deaf to the cries which.

"Very good," said Mendoza. "Then followed him. I may go?"

"You may, Monsieur Mendoza; but don't forget to come back. Tell those two ladies whom you are hastening to meet that Lemaître will be grateful to them if they will spare you to him to-morrow for half an hour or so."

When he was safe from pursuit he fell into a walk, and at the same pace made his way to his lodging.

"Thank Heaven!" he said as he let himself in, “I have that loaf's end in the cupboard. These exercises have made me peckish."

Gods

By HELEN HOYT

WE wonder d yet seen

E looked in wonder at the feet of clay,

So clear to see, and yet not seen before;
We looked again, and sadly turned away,

And said that we would never worship more.
But the old need of worship we could not undo,
And so we found another god, and bowed anew.

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The Seasons in Russian Painting

By FRANCIS HAFFKINE SNOW

Author of "Ten Centuries of Russian Art," etc.

But what is this so-called soul of the

RUSSIAN landscape-paintychology of Russian landscape, which, in its complex,

it,

the Russian people. For the fundamental mood of the Russian landscape is the fundamental mood of the Russian man, a vast dreariness, an endless brooding; and this means especially the gold and violet melancholy of autumn, the deep, white sadness of the heavy snows. Yet the spring madness, too, is in the Russian soul, the wildness of yearning which the still halfpagan Slav so violently experiences when the snows of winter are melting, and the fields are flooded with pools of water; when the inky-plumaged ravens chatter on the sap-filled branches of the birches, and one hears everywhere the rippling laughter of the zelënnyi shum.1 And when, under an Italian sky, the ripe yellow corn and the buckwheat wave in the breeze, and the big stacks of hay exhale sweet odors, and the steppe stretches out like an undulating, golden ocean, the golden splendor of the Russian summer is also in the mooding of the Russian soul.

is also the soul of the Russian people?

The Russian landscape is vast. Its impression is an impression of eternity. Man in these gigantic distances is the merest point in space. Like the human soul in one of Pascal's most poignant "Thoughts," we stand on these boundless plains as between two infinities, the infinity from which we come, the infinity to which we go.

In the Russian winter one may travel for a hundred, five hundred, a thousand miles, one may journey from the city of Peter to old Mother Moscow, and from Moscow south to Kieff, and behold nothing but a vastly dreary, unchanging panorama of flat, snow-covered plains and stunted, ice-rooted trees.

Here and there lies a hamlet, with its wooden houses and church, the golden cupolas of which gleam richly from afar; its narrow, winding, snow-covered streets beginning and ending nowhere. Oh, the

1 Literally "the green noise," a popular Russian expression roughly translatable as "the sound of springtime growth."

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"THE BLACKBIRDS HAVE FLOWN HITHER," BY SAVRÁSOV

brooding soul-sickness, the blank desolateness of the Russian provincial town!

The Russian painter Iuón has painted this Russian landscape of the interior in pigment and color, as Chékhof and Turgénieff and Leonid Andréiev have painted it in words, with all its sordidness, its dreariness, its despair, its sudden flamboyances of barbaric magnificence flaming

like fire in a world of ice and snow. These provincial scenes-the clumsy, old-fashioned little houses, the squat pillars and droll verandas, the half-blind church windows, the multi-colored shops, with the topsyturvy blue-and-white letterings of their signs-assume in Iuón's paintings a poetic and strangely beautiful life. I am thinking of such pictures as his "Place of

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Pilgrimage Sergiévo" or his "During the Carnival," masterly deconstructions of the mood of a Russian provincial town. All here is Russian: the gray sky; the long, snow-covered streets; the low, huddled houses; the heavy two-horse sleighs, with their high yokes rimmed with bells, Noah's arks of elegance, drawn by sinewy, thin, little horses; above all the barbaric aspect of strange architecture and the flaming, flaring, flamboyant, screaming reds, the Russian, I might almost say the Slavic, color par excellence.

And beyond lies the forest. No less desolate, yet wilder, of a stern and rugged grandeur, are the winter-clad, ghostly Russian woods of the North, where one cannot go out with face uncovered.

Shishkin is the Russian poet in color, whose forest scenes still haunt my memory. These pictures of mysterious gloom, of

a somberness intensified by the dull-blue whiteness of the heavy snows, leave an impression both profound and permanent. Here is an art almost photographic, and this is no reproach.

But the cycle of the winter revolves; the snow melts, the fields are full of stagnant pools, dark blotches of water on the white snow, making a piebald patchwork. And there is the "green noise," with the lilt and gurgle of running waters. The air, despite the lingering snow, is balmy, filled with an odd, new softness; the jetty blackbirds whir across the blue, and caw in raucous dissonance; and beneath the snow the yellow drok and káshka are stirring in nature's mysterious and ever-renewing alchemy.

There is one picture in the modern Russian heritage which, I prophesy, will never be forgotten. I refer to "The Black

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